My first impressions without scrolling:
* Calendso has something to do with calendars, based on the name.
* It has a popular paid competitor called Calendly.
* It's open source, and there is a hosted version as well.
I do not yet know what problem it is solving for me or its existing customers.
Scrolling down slightly further, I see the testimonials, and see people find it when looking for a "scheduling & booking platform". I assume that's what it is, but I don't know why I need a "scheduling & booking platform".
When I scroll further or click "Features", I am jumped down the page, and I find out it is easily customizable, and has a bunch of integrations. I don't entirely understand what I can do with it or how I can interact with it as a user.
I have never heard of Calendly, and thus head over to their website. The first thing I see is "Calendly helps you schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails". Clicking their "Features" link, I find claims they are "The best automated scheduling software" and without scrolling I learn it "automatically check[s] availability and help[s] you connect with your best contacts, prospects and clients".
Based on my glance at Calendly, I'm not a potential customer or user, but I only learned that from your competitor, and I only learned about your competitor from you.
Most people who have the need this product is meeting will have already encountered Calendly as it is ubiquitous in the space. It's basically a generic term like "Zoom" at this point. "I'll send you my Calendly link" is something people will understand to mean send you a meeting scheduling link.
So "An open source Calendly alternative" is quite clear for most people who want to make use of this.
Their messaging is focused on reaching people who might use it, not the people who won't. As you note, after going through the site, the product is not something relevant to you.
I think they could improve the below-the-fold description quite a bit, but the two words "Calendly alternative" convey the important bit about it being a customer-facing time-slot picker that connects to all your calendars, CRMs and webconferencing tools more precisely than "appointment scheduler" which might miss these features and lock you into various others, and probably gets more relevant search traffic too.
The counter argument that clear communication isn't all that necessary, because the people looking to receive this knowledge already should know this?
that's good communication.
filters out non-prospects early.
I see this often on similar small product homepages. Many of them describe the product for someone already familiar with it, and could do with taking a step back and trying to describe it for someone who, figuratively speaking, accidentally stumbled onto it and has no idea what's going on.
The VC crowd would have you believe that every product must disrupt the whole world – for the casual visitor, their gradma and their dog.
But niche products have to ward off tyre-kickers and what-if time-wasters, as much as entice their target audience. Using industry-specific jargon kills both flies at once.
If you "don't get it", you may not be the target audience.
Not only does it signal to insiders that we know what we are talking about and that our software was built with them in mind, but it also scares away people that it is not built for. Which helps us avoid answering countless inquiries as to whether this software can work for this or that.
But hey, if it brings more money, it's justified, right? :/
https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1556761175-5973dc0f32e7
It's some picture of employees of "proof" (juding by the "proof.quip.com" URL in the guy's browser) watching a presentation by a guy in shorts holding a small statue of a whale with legs? What does that have to do with a calendar?
That’s basically the approach I took when writing that up.
I think the unfamiliarity is the most important part. It’s incredibly easy to be blind to what you know and others don’t. It also simulates a non interactive cold sell for the product, as opposed to trying to convince your competitor’s customers to jump ship.
If you are not a customer and the page makes you not want to engage further, then it is a good page, isn't it?
The product could do with a better slogan. Calling yourself "like X, but different" is a terrible strategy if someone like myself encounters your website having never heard of X. I don't know what Calendy is and I'd have to Google your competitor to find out what your product is offering...
The demo is intuitive but I have no idea what timezone these times and dates are in. I'd guess they're in my timezone, but if they are, consider explicitly telling users that.
This looks like a very nice tool that a lot of websites can make great use of. Due to covid restrictions, stores in my country need to reserve time slots for a limited amount of visitors if they want to open. This tool can offer exactly what nearly every store here needs for an affordable price, assuming those stores haven't found an alternative solution yet.
Well... if that were the case then this would support caldav as an open standard or at the very least mention it- as it stands it only seems to support Google Calendar. And all other (prorietary) solutions this software wants to integrate with are marked "coming soon".
For a claims like
> Our mission is to connect a billion people by 2031.
and
> What email has done to communication, we hope Calendso will do to meetings.
Thats not a lot.
Anyway I tried to run it.
This is a step that should not be neccessary
> 7. Open the prisma schema with [Prisma Studio](https://www.prisma.io/studio)
to manually create a user in the database - presumably there is a way to have prisma create an initial "admin" (or other) user without making me drop into a database shell.
Once in in I tried to add a google calendar, but that gave me a big red JSON error.
This software seems to not be in a usable state.
> 9. Fill out the fields (remembering to encrypt your password with BCrypt)
That's... A lot of manual work for something that surely is implemented in the code anyway (initialize a user).
Especially with marketing like "Built for teams that need more control", "we're committed to give developers, small businesses and enterprise the power to connect with anyone and make friends or business", "Calendso comes with plenty of integrations, as well as the ability to build custom integrations for any platform out there"...
(I was initially trying to find out if the layout was Sunday or Monday starting, but apparently it's neither)
Still, I'll bookmark Calenso for a look later!
I immediately understood what this was. That is not a brag at all, but I just happen to be a paying user of Calendly, so "Open source Calendly" was perfect for me.
I an curios to see how complicated it is to wire it up with Coogle Calendar and Office365 connections.
I will take it for a spin. :)
I'm still not sure that's what it is, but I'll take Mehmet Arziman's word for it.
- Need clarity/support for timezones (this is critical)
- Months need to be laid out correctly
- I looked around for a bit and didn't at first find any demo, until then I realized it was embedded in the page! Add a link in the navbar that says "Demo" that takes you to that page, and a big demo above the one on the front page saying "Demo:"
- "Open source Calendly alternative" might be a good start as long as you're still piggy-backing off Calendly's hard work in popularizing this kind of idea, but eventually you want to start defining your own product and stand on your own two legs
- I love the pretty design!
Around the "rudeness" of back and forth in Calendly. One of the most powerful features we built was the ability to show availability both ways. Meaning if the person who is booking with you has Calendly too, they will be able to see times where both you and them are available - which I think helps with the booking etiquette since Calendly will save time for both parties. It's a powerful feature since it makes it becomes more useful the more Calendly becomes the de facto scheduling platform (chances that someone you send a Calendly link also has Calendly grows)
Example: my manager is in meetings most of the day, with the meetings scheduled via outlook invites, so his free time is pretty specified in his work calendar. The majority of his direct reports do not have their free time specified in their work calendars.
I'm fine with him sending calendly links though -- and I get the impression that's the common view on the team. None of us want to be in meetings all day, so having to hunt through his calendar from time to time is far preferred.
You’re probably not the target audience then. Calendly is a $3 billion bootstrapped company, it has plenty of users. I’m relying on it increasingly week after week.
Was wondering if there was an integration with Salesforce via Zapier.
I would never want to self host this. We're a small team, and no one technical wants to manage yet another server, nor do we want the responsibility for when something screws up and a salesperson misses a demo or a support staff member isn't reminded about a training session.
The pricing isn't that competitive with Calendly ($3/user/month savings) which would translate to a savings of $108 annually for us, not enough to justify switching.
I feel pitching this as an open source alternative to Calendly is the wrong angle. The only people who care about open source are developers who are the least likely people to need scheduling software. And people who do need Calendly aren't going to be moved to switch because Calendly works well enough already.
Finally, the copy at the bottom of the page reads:
> For instance, booking a COVID vaccine shouldn't happen on a server in another country that somebody else is in control of.
Are people using Calendly to book COVID vaccines? If I used your product instead, wouldn't I still be booking a vaccine on someone else's server?
I wish any small competitor success against a large incumbent, but I would radically change my approach to compete against Calendly.
Might be interesting for people who need CalDAV support.
The content is only shortly visible and then immediately fades away.
Please, less fancy for more better UI and accessibility.
Like, it's not even that important. Just disable the effects, and you'll improve the presentation 100x.
A well working scheduling, open-source tool would be great. And I also read that you can integrate it easily into other stuff?
Some feedback: 1) It seems premature to launch without API docs for an API driven product (or, at least, I couldn't find them)
2) The choice of React for UI seems strange since this is intended to be embedded within other apps. Wouldn't Web Components have been a better choice?
3) Not being able to specify timezone in a calendar app is a deal-killer for most, I would think.
4) The installation instructions state that you add your first user manually in the database. This would be fine for pre-alpha software, but seems a bit rough for 1.0 - though I understand that your business model isn't focused on the self-hosted
5) The primary reason I'm interested in the product is because I'm a CTO for healthcare companies. HIPAA compliance is top of my list of priorities. I love that you call it out in your "enterprise" offering, but it would be helpful (to me) to have more details about what the difference in offering is as well as pricing for HIPAA compliance. What are you doing differently for hosting in that case? Is it single-tenant?
Very cool product, I'm looking forward to seeing it evolve!
I know it's unreasonble, but I find it somehow rude when someone asks me to go hunting around in their calendar, even though it's more efficient than agreeing on meeting slots.
I have even passed on some good opportunities simply because I have an aversion to calend.ly!
It also has to be sent with some sort of message/introduction, otherwise yes, it does feel like I'm being pushed aside.
Finally, the person sending the Calendly link has to keep their calendar actually up to date. There is nothing worse than setting an appointment through Calendly, and then being told "Oh sorry, I actually have a conflict".
I think the "rudeness" interpretation comes from an interpretation that the person sending it "doesn't care enough", which isn't always true.
That said, despite a brief first negative emotional response (like the parent said, it kind of feels impersonal), my rational side appreciates the convenience of calendly and not having to type more emails to agree on time.
Yes, I could go to the effort of deploying it myself to try it out, but that is still significantly more effort than just signing in and trying it out.
It feels like there is a very large gap between "It's free forever by self hosting" and "12/user/month".
I'm not suggesting that you have to have a free-tier-forever kind of plan, just that the requirement of hosting it yourself just to be able to poke around at it is a pretty high bar (especially if someone had to pay someone else to install/set it up for them).
imho: * Calendso has the potential to become an interstellar spaceship, whenever it comes to scheduling a meeting without hassle.
* Aggressive marketing/"comparing" is not my style - prefer a more subtil way. Can you push the first version of your spaceship to pole position "comparing". yes. Will it work, maybe. At least you are in the race.
>So "An open source Calendly alternative" is quite clear for most people who want to make use of this.
ack.
* Knowing the team behind, the mentioned shortcomings will be resolved asap
* I18N is on the roadmap/in the pipeline
> 9. Fill out the fields (remembering to encrypt your password with BCrypt)
Find this normal. Do this often. Has room for improvement. Sure. Will be improved, sure.
imho: The most important thing about calendso is how much heart and love the team is putting into it. I can feel that. It makes me feel humble.
Go, go, go ... and stay safe.
I don’t exactly know why. The UI is nice, being able to pick a date is cool, and automated calendar invite does work. There is just something that tickle in the wrong way. Mostly because these don’t get updated seriously, you can’t pick any dates shown as available in reality. It’s also a little passive agressive when finding a date/time that works is really not that hard. It feels like a technological solution to a human communication problem. Just get better at communicating! Suggest two dates/time that works for you well and you think should also work for the other person and it often does!
>Suggest two dates/time that works for you well and you think should also work for the other person and it often does!
This assumes that both participants have their calendars under control and in their mind. This is impossible for someone like myself so I heavily lean on my EAs or automated scheduling tools for individuals to schedule time with me.
It’s impossible to keep my calendar in my head because I require a mandatory 4 days of notice before scheduling a one off meeting so I would be tasked with keeping the next 30 days of events to be able to schedule time on my own.
Calendly can be used to hold office-hours, and to allow users or customers an easy way to get face time with you.
Also, I have a lot of acquaintances that are always busy, and scheduling with them can often take several ping-pong hits. I like the idea of a software taking care that of that hassle for us.
Maybe it would make sense as component of a niche-market CRM solution?
I made a quick video to explore the open source project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaIQhG8AL0w
I'm not so sure. The frequency/duration of appointments would be juicy information for insurance companies, future employers, etc.
"we have a whole host of features on our roadmap that have all been suggested and voted on by the community which we plan to bring in the near future"
One of the features displayed is multilingual support, but may not be available right now according to the vid.
